The Beijing Treaty gave film actors five exclusive rights, then let national law hand all five to the producer

by Amara Diallo · September 9, 2026

Culture & Entertainment Writer, The Globe Ledger

For most of the history of international copyright, a musician whose voice was pressed onto a record had international rights and an actor whose performance was captured on film did not. WIPO's own background brief on the subject puts the gap plainly: with the update of the WIPO Performances and Phonograms Treaty, it says, "the rights of AV performers were not brought up to speed alongside other performances." The instrument that closed that gap is the Beijing Treaty on Audiovisual Performances, and the reason it took so long to agree is a single article that most summaries of it skip.

The treaty was concluded at a diplomatic conference in Beijing on June 26, 2012. WIPO's release of that day (PR/2012/714) records a conference "attended by 156 member states, 6 intergovernmental organizations and 45 non-governmental organizations," at the end of which "122 countries signed the Final Act of the treaty, and 48 countries have signed the treaty itself." Signing the Final Act means having been in the room. Signing the treaty means intending to be bound later. Neither binds anyone to anything on the day.

What the treaty grants is not in dispute. Reading the text as published by WIPO in 2012, performers in audiovisual fixations get an exclusive right of reproduction (Article 7), of distribution (Article 8), of commercial rental (Article 9), of making available on demand (Article 10) and of broadcasting and communication to the public (Article 11). Article 10 is written for the streaming era in so many words: the performer may authorise making the performance available "by wire or wireless means, in such a way that members of the public may access them from a place and at a time individually chosen by them." Article 5 adds moral rights — to be identified as the performer, and to object to distortions prejudicial to reputation — which the WIPO brief describes as non-transferable.

Then comes Article 12, headed "Transfer of Rights." It permits a Contracting Party to provide in its national law that once a performer has consented to the fixation of a performance, "the exclusive rights of authorization provided for in Articles 7 to 11 of this Treaty shall be owned or exercised by or transferred to the producer of such audiovisual fixation" — subject to any contract to the contrary. The five rights the treaty has just created can, in other words, pass to the studio at the moment the actor agrees to be filmed, by operation of law rather than by negotiation.

This is not a loophole discovered after the fact. It is the compromise that unlocked the negotiation. The 2000 diplomatic conference that first attempted this treaty ended without one; WIPO's brief records that "nineteen out of the twenty substantive treaty provisions were agreed to by Member States at this Diplomatic Conference." The twentieth was transfer of rights, and the deadlock lasted more than a decade. The brief dates the breakthrough precisely: "In June 2011, member states reached agreement on transfer of rights." The agreement was to disagree in a structured way — to write a treaty that grants rights universally and leaves their default destination to each country.

Article 12 does carry two counterweights. A Contracting Party may require that any such consent be recorded in a contract that is, in the treaty's words, "in writing and signed by both parties to the contract or by their duly authorized representatives." And whatever happens to the exclusive rights, the article preserves the possibility of money: "Independent of the transfer of exclusive rights described above, national laws or individual, collective or other agreements may provide the performer with the right to receive royalties or equitable remuneration for any use of the performance, as provided for under this Treaty including as regards Articles 10 and 11." Note the verb in both cases. May, not shall. The treaty authorises these protections; it does not require them.

The same permissive drafting runs through the rest of the instrument. Article 11 gives performers an exclusive broadcasting right, but a Contracting Party may substitute a right to equitable remuneration instead — and under Article 11(3) may declare that it will apply either version "only in respect of certain uses, or that it will limit their application in some other way." Article 19 lets a country declare that Articles 7 to 11 will not apply to performances already fixed when the treaty entered into force for it, which is to say that an entire back catalogue can be carved out by notification. Article 13 confines exceptions to the familiar three-step test: special cases that do not conflict with normal exploitation and do not unreasonably prejudice the performer's legitimate interests.

Article 14 sets the floor for how long any of it lasts: protection must run "at least, until the end of a period of 50 years computed from the end of the year in which the performance was fixed." That clock starts at fixation, not at release, not at the performer's death.

Getting the treaty into force took another eight years. Article 26 provides that it enters into force three months after 30 eligible parties have deposited instruments of ratification or accession. Indonesia was the thirtieth. WIPO announced on January 28, 2020 that "with the ratification of Indonesia on January 28, 2020, the Beijing Treaty will enter into force for its 30 contracting parties on April 28, 2020."

Growth since has been steady rather than dramatic. The Assembly of the Beijing Treaty, in its report adopted on December 17, 2021, recorded that "the total number of Contracting Parties was 43," naming nine states that had joined since September 2020 — Armenia, Comoros, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Kiribati, Liechtenstein, the Philippines, Sao Tome and Principe and Togo. On the WIPO Lex contracting-parties table for the treaty, accessed September 9, 2026, the table listed 48 contracting parties, with Saint Kitts and Nevis the most recent entry, acceding on July 8, 2024 and in force from October 8, 2024. That is the figure the table showed on that date, not a figure that can be assumed to hold later.

The membership list is where the practical reach of Article 12 becomes visible. China, Japan, the Republic of Korea and the Russian Federation are bound. So are Chile, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Peru, Switzerland and the United Arab Emirates. The United States signed the treaty on June 26, 2012 and appears on the table with no instrument and no entry-into-force date. The European Union signed on June 19, 2013 and is in the same position, as are France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands, Sweden and the United Kingdom individually. India does not appear on the table at all — neither as a party nor as a signatory.

Signature is not accession. Under Article 23, any WIPO member state may become party to the treaty, and the European Union is separately eligible; the step that matters is depositing an instrument, and for these signatories that step has not been taken. The consequence, on the table as it stood on the access date, is that the treaty's minimum standards bind China, Japan, the Republic of Korea and the Russian Federation, and do not bind the United States or the European Union and its larger member states — a distribution that cuts across the industry rather than along any single line of production or export.

The lesson of Article 12 is a general one about how modern rights treaties are built. A right that is granted internationally and allocated nationally is a right whose real content depends on where the contract was signed and which law governs it. The Beijing Treaty settled the question of whether audiovisual performers have rights. It deliberately did not settle the question of who ends up holding them.